Lockheed Martin has quietly obtained a patent associated with its design for a potentially revolutionary compact fusion reactor, or CFR. If this project has been progressing on schedule, the company could debut a prototype system that size of shipping container, but capable of powering a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier or 80,000 homes, sometime in the next year or so.
The patent, for a portion of the confinement system, or embodiment, is dated Feb. 15, 2018. The Maryland-headquartered defense contractor had filed a provisional claim on April 3, 2013 and a formal application nearly a year later. Our good friend Stephen Trimble, chief of Flightglobal's Americas Bureau, subsequently spotted it and Tweeted out its basic details.
In 2014, the company also made a splash by announcing they were working on the device at all and that it was the responsibility of its Skunk Works advanced projects office in Palmdale, California. At the time, Dr. Thomas McGuire, head of the Skunk Works’ Compact Fusion Project, said the goal was to have a working reactor in five years and production worthy design within 10.
[...] Considering the five year timeline Dr. McGuire put out in 2014 for achieving a workable prototype, maybe we’re due for another big announcement from Lockheed Martin in the near future.
Related Stories
Energy From Fusion In 'A Couple Years,' CEO Says, Commercialization In Five
TAE Technologies will bring a fusion-reactor technology to commercialization in the next five years, its CEO announced recently at the University of California, Irvine.
"The notion that you hear fusion is another 20 years away, 30 years away, 50 years away—it's not true," said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of the company formerly known as Tri Alpha Energy. "We're talking commercialization coming in the next five years for this technology."
[...] For more than 20 years TAE has been pursuing a reactor that would fuse hydrogen and boron at extremely high temperatures, releasing excess energy much as the sun does when it fuses hydrogen atoms. Lately the California company has been testing the heat capacity of its process in a machine it named Norman after the late UC Irvine physicist Norman Rostoker.
Its next device, dubbed Copernicus, is designed to demonstrate an energy gain. It will involve deuterium-tritium fusion, the aim of most competitors, but a milestone on TAE's path to a hotter, but safer, hydrogen-boron reaction.
Binderbauer expects to pass the D-T fusion milestone soon. "What we're really going to see in the next couple years is actually the ability to actually make net energy, and that's going to happen in the machine we call Copernicus," he said in a "fireside chat" at UC Irvine.
Also at NextBigFuture.
Related: Lockheed Martin's Patent for a Fusion Reactor the Size of a Shipping Container
How 'Miniature Suns' Could Provide Cheap, Clean Energy
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:54AM (14 children)
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/03/lpp-fusion-has-funds-try-to-reach-nuclear-fusion-net-gain-milestone.html [nextbigfuture.com]
The shipping container form factor is a good idea on Lockheed's part, and it would also be interesting to see how it could be used in planes and spacecraft. Assuming the thing works, that is.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by idiot_king on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:21AM (10 children)
Precisely this, and nothing more.
We've been promised fusion for... how many decades now?
I'll keep my money on solar and hydro, thanks.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:36AM (1 child)
Come one, come all! Crabs, HIV, genital warts, the clap, and more! My fetid little friend has it all!
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(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:52PM
Oh, you're back to this. I was finding your vignettes morbidly entertaining.
Why not give the weather war another try for a while instead?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:38AM (3 children)
Despite being a "Beltway bandit", Lockheed Martin offers some name brand credibility for their approach, compared to other players in small-scale fusion like LPP Fusion, Helion Energy, Tri-Alpha Energy, General Fusion, and others [nextbigfuture.com].
Still, it's not like they issued a press release here. And everyone wants patents, even on things that don't work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion_Reactor [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:46PM (2 children)
I'm surprised they went after any patents, it probably means they see competition in the marketplace and there could be a patent first dispute. The reason I'm surprised is that this is a Skunkworks project, so the customer is probably the DOD. If Skunkworks is making progress on container sized fusion, that is not something you want to advertise to potential adversaries, as it could be a game changer for armies so very dependent on energy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:43PM (1 child)
Could be investor/stockholder 'bait'. Hey, look here, we have a patent! Investors flock in their direction. In five years time: oh, that patent, yeah, didn't really include anything that wasn't already readily understood and known. Turns out it didn't work. But, look again! We have another new patent, this one will definitely work. Trust us, we're MBAs and financial controllers!
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:08PM
Or alternatively:
Look at this new patent - it's the size of a shipping container1 (Are you sure you wouldn't prefer a digital download?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:18AM (3 children)
I saw a TED talk about fusion power, the speaker had a nice diagram showing how close we are to positive output, and we are approaching it linearly. There was one major outlier, though: ITER. As the speaker explained: Everything takes longer when the government is involved.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:57PM (2 children)
According to the world of TED talks, a post-scarcity planet-wide Star Trek utopia is right around the corner, and we're very close to being either solar powered with chloroplasts replacing our mitochondria or uploaded as computer simulations where we'll all live glorious lives of luxury catering to our every vain whim. And some of us will inhabit robot bodies that are capable of carrying our consciousnesses across the vast star ocean.
It sounds fantastic! Let me know when TED talks stop being wide-eyed hand-wavy bullshit!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:58PM
That's your own personal utopia and will not happen.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:47PM
Midichlorians?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:11PM (2 children)
> Assuming the thing works, that is.
Fine to be sceptical. But there is a recent technical development, namely the invention of so-called "High Temperature Superconductors" (YBCO, ReBCO). These enable approx 20 Tesla magnetic fields to be generated, which is something of a game-changer for the fusion community. The previous field limit was more like 5 or 10 T.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:20PM (1 child)
Yeah OK, but the real story is the high beta like over 1 claims. How do you get a continuous long term stable beta over 1 anyway? Weird idea conceptually. My guess is its cheaty like x-axis magnet provides 1 unit of pressure and y-axis provides 1 unit of pressure so the net vector force at a 45 degree angle between them is sqrt(2) of pressure or a beta of 140%. Good luck with that. Wikipedia is less pie in they sky and claims a beta of 1, which again, is at least less ridiculous but is still very much "good luck with that". Beta of 1 sounds like zero resistance wiring, spherical cows, 100% efficient carburetors, that kind of stuff. Not controversial they could run above 1% continuously, heroic Nobel Prize to run the plasma above the Troyon limit continuously... maybe. But going for broke and claiming running at precisely 1, come on pull the other leg...
In practice a tokamak gets like 1% beta on a good day. There's an instability limit Troyon or something like that around 4%, where above that oscillations get uncontrollable until the plasma shorts itself out. Now a tokamak is a 60s idea where it was pie in the sky 100% beta value sounds great to me, but it took until 80s to figure out the whole Troyon limit thing. So the life story of the tomamak is "in theory we should be able to turn the dials to 11 and make a shitload of power, but whenever we turn the dials above 1% or so it all blows up and we couldn't figure out why, at all, for 25 years, then over the last 40 years we haven't figured out a way around the problem we finally mathematically defined, so if we can only turn the dial up to 1% this thing is gonna either suck or be super expensive or both" And thats why our Deloreans in our garages don't have a "Mr Fusion" duct taped to the roof today, despite 1980s movie claims to the contrary.
Its hard to piece together the story that lots of hand waving about cusps suddenly makes legacy 1950s magnetic mirror designs work again. The diagrams I've seen imply some interestingly large and invasive internal coils to make those cusps. OK well maybe. Again this is another "good luck with that".
For people too lazy to look up what a plasma physics beta value is, from a certain systems engineering perspective its like the alpha value of a bipolar transistor which is the reciprocal of transistor beta. F-ing inconsistent engineers. So you dump X units of raw electrical (magnetic) power into a gadget and X% of the power does what you want (and this is called the transistor alpha, fusion reactor beta, other stuff in other fields I'm sure) and the rest turns into heat or burns it out if you force it anyway, etc.
I'll separate the uncontested factual stuff above from my hobby of delicious conspiracy theories below.
Note that a commercial power production failure doesn't necessarily mean its a lost cause. Swap in an intentionally dirty fuel and even if it makes no net power at all, it could irradiate the hell out of something for some purpose. Materials science neutron source or some weird industrial thing (food irradiation, or maybe a neutron war weapon that uses no fissile materials?). If you could make it the size of an old fashioned vacuum tube I bet it would make an interesting initiator for small a-bombs, which makes me think this whole idea probably dates to 1940s but has been classified for 80 years only recently "rediscovered" in public much like supposedly happened to a lot of cryptography work was supposedly invented by the NSA in like the 50s but public key crypto didn't exist in public for many more decades. My guess is there's a piece of paper from Los Alamos dated 1944 with this design on it as an atomic bomb neutron source initiator stamped classified and honestly the way this dudes idea slipped public is only because everyone who remembers that '44 design is dead so this design escaped.
A side conspiracy theory is Lockheed Martin was building these little devices on a very small scale of size using compartmentalized intense security as a black lab research source for the last 80 years or whatever strictly as a non-power generating neutron source for (redacted) purposes, and some dude finally noticed the scaling factors such that if you take the vacuum tube sized neutron source and fatten it up to the size of a jet engine and feed it a tastier fuel, the scaling math claims it'll generate net power...
So in summary if you want X units of magnetic pressure on a plasma, historically pragmatically as per actual results you have to build magnet designs for 100X the pressure and only run the plasma up to 1% kinda sorta handwavy and these dudes are claiming they increased efficiency to 1:1 such that X units of stable long term magnetic pressure can come from X units of electricity. Note that I'm not disagreeing with your claim of evolutionary small incremental increase in magnetic field strength; that is true and helpful but this "yeah beta values of 1% used to be good but we run at 100%+" is a bit of a revolutionary claim.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:18PM
Shoot, you made me RTFA. I see your point. Interesting...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:37AM (11 children)
I remember when they did the initial announcement - gosh I wonder if I even saw that here and got into some of my first soyarguments over it. Anyway, I really hope this isn't a bunch of BS and they bring this out. We need fusion power as a species.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:24AM
It's in-line with all the other Fusion power predictions of the last 20 years: 5-10 years out.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:50PM (9 children)
Well, until someone actually gets it done, we're going to have to make do with coffee.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:16PM (8 children)
I think what people are missing is that: when fusion power debuts, it's going to be marginally efficient. Right now they can't get net positive power out of anything you might call a sustained reaction. When the first "practical" units come online, they're going to be expensive and weak (as opposed to the expensive and useless that they are today.) Then, it's going to be "another 5-10 years" before they become cost-competitive with the most expensive of other current industrial scale power generation technologies.
Oh, and expect some nasty side-effect environmental issues from the early fusion generators too. The core tech may be clean, but there will be enabling engineering that uses something or other that isn't exactly environmentally friendly.
I'm all for developing it, but it's going to be one of those technologies that comes into the world sideways and slowly, like Artificial Intelligence.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:34PM (7 children)
Anything that generates a lot of neutrons will become annoyingly radioactive. The first generation commercial fusion reactors might not produce any radioactive waste, but when they reach their end of life, there will be huge chunks of the reactor itself that will be radioactive.
It isn't going to be instant free power for everyone like people have been promising. It's going to start out expensive and get better over time. Just like any technology.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:15PM (4 children)
I don't know - wood for fire started out cheap and has gotten more expensive over time...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday March 29 2018, @09:23PM (3 children)
I don't know where you get your wood from, but chainsaws have made getting firewood cheaper than at any point in history. A couple of guys can do the work of dozens.
If you mean "I have to pay $x for wood when it used to be cheaper." I make about 50 bucks an hour. I can buy an entire truckload of wood for $50. My lazy ass can not chop an entire truckload of wood in an hour.
And check out this thing [youtube.com]. No idea if it is more economical, but it is damn cool.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 30 2018, @12:24AM (2 children)
Wood used to be obtained for free - pre split and dried by nature, all you had to do was collect it.
Then "Kings" owned the land and you had to do something for them to get permission to collect wood.
Now, you have to travel far with a truck to find wood to pay money to harvest. It's still only $30 per tree, plus cutting, splitting, drying and hauling - but that's a hell of a lot of infrastructure to maintain just to get some wood "easily" because you're using a chainsaw.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday April 02 2018, @09:54PM (1 child)
So you are pining for the times when the serfs were owned by feudal lords? Because you could get cheap firewood?
Ok, dude, whatever. Either buy some land with trees on it or pay someone that has them.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 03 2018, @03:16AM
Not pining, not oaking, just calling out that the price of wood as fuel has steadily risen over time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday March 29 2018, @03:38AM (1 child)
I have been thinking about that point more and more and it is a really good one. Lockheed I'm sure expects this to be quite lucrative for them on a per unit basis. They aren't into mass manufacturing things like GE washing machines. They want to make a handful of expensive things and sell them to discerning customers such as the US military.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday March 29 2018, @09:25PM
Another poster mentioned the absurd actual cost of shipping fuel to deserts in the middle east. The military does not care much for cost effectiveness, and by proxy, neither does Lockheed. So I would be very surprised if this thing made any sort of economical sense.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:40AM (12 children)
Why not patent a container-sized time machine?
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:42AM (8 children)
They need a viable fusion power source for the time machine first.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:50AM (5 children)
Enough to generate 1.81 jiggawhats at least!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:04AM
ONE POINT TWENTY ONE JIGGAWATTS??? [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:35AM (3 children)
jigawotts, you uninformed person!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:16PM
Just a gigolo everywhere I go
People know the part, I'm playing
Paid for every dance, selling each romance
Every night some heart betraying
There will come a day
Youth will pass away
Then what will they say about me
When the end comes I know
They'll say just a gigolo
As life goes on without me
'Cause I ain't got nobody
Nobody nobody cares for me
I'm so sad and lonely
Sad and lonely sad and lonely
Won't some sweet mama
Come and take a chance with me
Cause I ain't so bad
Get along with me babe
Been singin' love songs all of the time
Even only be, honey only, only be
Bop bozadee bozadee bop zitty bop
I ain't got nobody 'cept love songs in love
Hummala bebhuhla zeebuhla boobuhla
Hummala bebhuhla zeebuhla bop
I ain't got nobody, nobody
Nobody cares for me, nobody, nobody
I'm so sad and lonely
Sad and lonely, sad and lonely
Won't some sweet mama come
And take a chance with me
'Cause I ain't so bad
Get along with me babe
Been singin' love songs, all of the time
Even only be, honey only, only be
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:07PM (1 child)
Here's a short piece about the word gigawatt [myfluxcapacitor.com].
One will note that the OED says gigawatt [oxforddictionaries.com] and Merriam-Webster gives preference to "jiga"watt [merriam-webster.com].
Wikipedia gives both pronunciations [wikipedia.org]:
And now you know the rest of the story.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:56PM
10^9
and if someone says "jigabyte" or "jigapascals" you can just slap them in the face
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:32AM
The age old fusion-and-time-machine conundrum.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:49AM
Pfft. It makes far more sense to focus on the time machine, and power it by any means necessary no matter how non-viable it is. If they can get the time machine working, they can bring back a viable power source for it from the future.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:02AM (1 child)
Because if it works, some time traveller from the future will beat you by travelling into the past and filing the patent before you can. That's the reason time machines will never be sold: It simply doesn't make economic sense.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:01PM
Yes and it'll start a race with the competing time travelers jumping back into the past by ever bigger increments to try to preempt all the others and be the first to file the patent. First, Venice in 1474 will (have) become drastically overpopulated by millions of such travelers all queuing up at the Senate to file under the newly established Venetian Patent Statute. After a while, the danger of subsequent travelers materializing partially or fully inside the bodies of those that had already arrived will have become exceedingly perilous. Consequently next there will have been ever increasingly outlandish attempts to establish a first patent office earlier and earlier in history, culminating in quadrillions of cloned time travelers arriving infinitesimally close to the singularity of the Big Bang to each put up their own patent offices. In fact it's highly likely that such an event could actually have caused the Big Bang itself.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:07PM
It's been done. [nist.gov] They're even smaller than a container, some of them. We call them "clocks."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:12AM (4 children)
It is pretty certain that the SkunkWorks is doing SOMETHING. Whether it is a reactor or whether the reactor announcement is merely a cover story for whatever spooky spy crap they are really doing we may never know for sure. Tis the nature of that world.
(Score: 2) by Weasley on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:24PM (3 children)
Why even bother with a cover story if it's not a fusion reactor?
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:39PM (1 child)
Because what ever they are covering up is so utterly odd and out of this world it makes a fusion reactor look normal? This is from the people who used Howard Hughes mining the sea floor for minerals as cover for their project to pick up an exploded Russian submarine 3 miles down at the bottom of the ocean.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:37PM
Just got sold a couple of years ago. I believe it had been used to house the Sea Shadow stealth ship proof of concept, both of which got sold to a scrapping company, the former for some sort of storage use and the latter as classified scrap to be disposed of.
Sad really. The Sea Shadow would've made a great museum piece, especially given its lack of toilet and other facilities necessary for any sort of cruises on it.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:46PM
Because they couldn't hide the activity entirely. If enough people work there, enough people deliver exotic particle physics sorta gear there, etc. somebody is going to start talking and websites proposing theories. So come out and announce what you are 'doing' and shut most of that speculation up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:14AM
I'm sure LM bean-counter use number of patents as one of the metrics to decide which projects to cut, and which ones to boost. They're basically off-loading the job of technical evaluation onto the Patent Office.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:38AM (17 children)
You aren't supposed to be able to patent something that can't be demonstrated to actually work.
There have been many working demonstrations of small scale fission reactors demonstrated around the world. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx [world-nuclear.org]
Some of these are as small as semi trailer.
I suppose some of these are patented. But how do you patent something that doesn't work?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:52AM (2 children)
Do you really think the patent office actually demands to see a working prototype? It's easy to patent something that doesn't work: write up a patent and file it. It's been done countless times. It's a key feature in the business model of patent trolls in fact.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:45AM
In this case it's a business model of stock market trolls. Troll the investors "we haz fusion in container"
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:59PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:53AM
This patent appears to describe some form of magnetic confinement device. I am not an expert in the subject of magnetic confinement so I am not sure if the invention is reasonable, or worthy of a patent. That being said, magnetic confinement is very popular in fusion research and several well-known designs use it, such as the tokamak and the stellarator.
What makes you think this new invention "can't be demonstrated to actually work"?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 28 2018, @05:01AM (6 children)
High [nationalgeographic.com] school [wired.com] students [theguardian.com] have made fusion work.
What you meant to say is that nobody has made fusion power commercially viable yet. And before you can do that, you have to demonstrate it. Which is exactly what Lockheed Martin is doing. But it has nothing to do with a patent for a confinement system, of which there have been many working examples.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by istartedi on Wednesday March 28 2018, @05:55AM (4 children)
Semantics. Without even following your links, I'm going to
assume that you've linked to some students building a Farnsworth Fusor
or similar device. It does create neutrons via fusion. Low energy
neutrons, and at rates so low AFAIK they aren't even a regulatory
concern. This is not what people mean when they say "make fusion work".
What they mean is "get more energy out of the fuel than you put
in to start the reaction, and do so in a controlled manor".
We have made H-bombs which are over-unity. We have made fusion
reactors which are under-unity. We haven't made any kind of over-unity
fusion reactor that you would want to share a city with while it's operating.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:21AM (3 children)
That would be a commercially viable fusion reactor. And yes, that's probably what most people mean when they say "working", but when it comes to patents, there is no requirements that the prototype be commercially viable.
Just like there was no requirements that the first car be faster than a horse. A car slower than a horse was pretty useless, but it still demonstrated that building a car was possible. Gradual improvements over time took the car from something interesting only to enthusiasts to being what it is today.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:02PM (2 children)
That's going too far. It's entirely reasonable for an over-unity fusion reactor instance to be non-viable commercially. It could have a very limited lifetime; it could use means to initiate the reaction that are not reliable; it could suffer from containment problems such as erosion or deterioration of the containment chamber(s); it might work fine, but simply produce so little power compared to its cost that it isn't commercially viable.
A commercially viable fusion reactor has to meet the same kind of metrics any other power source does. It has to be maintainable; it has to have a positive ROA, which in turn implies a decent operating lifetime as combined with a reasonably priced billable power output and low enough maintenance costs that the maintenance doesn't raise operating costs unacceptably; it has to be both safe and easy to operate; it has to be reliable; and it has to fail safely. There are probably many other metrics I've missed, and very few of these apply to an R&D level fusion design at all.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)
And there's the fuzzy in between of military power sources. Surely the cheapest source of watts today is a nuclear reactor, but the Army delivered lots of $50/gallon diesel to the middle of nowhere in the middle east because you can't really build a PWR in the desert for a FOB. Or the cheapest way to propel a large boat is a diesel engine but for military task purposes nukes are very popular even if oil burning would be cheaper. Even if in theory if might be cheaper to burn oil, the idea of a shipping container sized nuke must be enticing to shipping container transport boats, ship one non-profit container in exchange for ripping out all that diesel engine and tankage and paying those fuel bills all around the world etc, just one little container and a huge extension cord is all the boat needs...
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:01PM
There's that whole cruising range issue, and there's also a peak power issue – nukes can make a lot steam, and very quickly. Subs in particular benefit from being able to go wherever, whenever, without having to refuel. For carriers, since the aircraft need lots of petro-fuels, the advantage is somewhat muted, although still they have the ability to keep the carrier itself on station without refueling, which in turn means fewer tankers going back and forth overall.
No matter what the vessel, unless it is 100% automated, the sailors need to be fed, so resupply eventually becomes an issue no matter what the power source. Carriers have a lot of room for storage, but they also have very large crews...
Essentially unlimited power availability also means that energy weapons are more practical, so lasers, particle beams, railguns, that sort of thing will be better accommodated on vessels with nuclear power sources, fission or otherwise.
Anyway, I agree that dependable, high-output fusion reactor implementations would be of immense value to the navy, even if quite costly. Also to remote science installations, etc.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:02AM
It may not have to do with the patent, but it does have to do with a workable confinement system. One that can work for seconds has been demonstrate, one that can work in various special circumstances has been demonstrated, but nobody has yet demonstrated one that can maintain a high enough pressure for long enough to be useful for more than a demonstration.
IIUC, LPP is doing something significantly different, boron-hydrogen fusion isn't something I've heard people talking about before, and apparently they need to use a particular isotope of boron to avoid producing radioactive beryllium. That sound weird and interesting, and certainly different. Perhaps Lockheed is doing something equally different, and just being more secretive about it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday March 28 2018, @05:53AM (3 children)
So, what's the latest on Rossi's E-CAT?
I keep hearing all that PR - BigNameDrops, and secrecy, but so far, anything they have released only demonstrated to me the whole thing is nothing but theater for the investment crowd, not a power generation system in *any* meaning of the word.
I did quite a big writeup on that one over at TheOilDrum.com, you know, a good multipage science rant full of thermodynamic equations backing why I believe the videos shown were bullshit. For some reason, I can't find it through Google, and I have to go recover my login credentials from a decade old computer. Hope that rant is still up. I tried like the dickens to keep rich people from spending their money on something that I could find no scientific credibility of, but all the science I can illustrate is no match for a well-bred marketer with outstretched hand.
( Strongly in Steven Krivet's camp. ).
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:38PM (2 children)
I miss that site. It was kind of a social experiment where there was some specialist knowledge that was well known in the specialty, then tried to push it out to the general public, but only maybe 1% or less of the general population was smart enough to understand it and see it as obvious when pointed out, while 99% of the population can't understand it and generally speaking only uses the topic for confidence scams and similar manipulation. Its a good display of the cultural problem of hyperspecialization where eventually something vitally important will be too complicated for the public to understand so blunder and collapse is inevitable.
I never had anything to say there, but WRT pushing the concepts to the general public there is at least one long term multi-decade energy financial investor (me) who knew all that stuff and thought it was interesting to see it discussed in public or at least attempted. That site did have fans. From memory the site's founders finally gave up on discussing the topic around 2013 and closed down. They tried hard for a good 8 years.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday March 29 2018, @11:12AM (1 child)
I felt a kindred spirit with the guys of TheOilDrum, being I used to work at Chevron, first the refinery, then at the Oil Field Research division. We talked about that kind of stuff all the time. We were constantly working on how to handle watering out wells, and the geologists were always speculating on just how long the oil companies could keep up with demand, and the hell that was going to break loose when the market said "more", and the Earth said "reservoir is empty".
I had been at Grandpa's farm, and heard him lamenting about the water table, the aquifer, and his pumps. But knowing that when the rains come again, the aquifers will be replenished. However, I understood the oil reservoirs were created in geologic time, and we were depleting them. I invested a lot of my retirement resources in petroleum, as I figured when shit hit the fan, peak oil, I'd much rather be holding oil, backed up with the energy in it, than the American Dollar, instantiated at will by the bankers through fractional reserve banking. I remember studying what has happened to many fiat currencies, and did not want to be left holding the equivalent of lousy toilet paper.
I had no idea fracking would work as well as it apparently does... I thought they were just getting a few last farts out of the Earth - and gas is not nearly as dense as liquid petroleum.
Then I see this Rossi fellow making millions doing what gives all appearances to me as nothing more than a theatrical performance. But the men of the suit and handshake eat it up.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday March 30 2018, @04:07PM
Classic logistics curve thing where higher tech methods after the easy stuff is harvested imply steeper growth implies steeper decline....
(Score: 2) by leftover on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:31PM
That is another aspect aspect of patents ruined by the move to "first to file". An utterly specious content-free application beats having a working model. IMHO they should be two different documents, with the Concept Description being mostly honorary and the Patent requiring a working model. All so-called Design Patents and Software Patents should actually be 5-year copyrights but that process is fubar too.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:37PM
The rule for having a working model was thrown out years ago.